Do you need shareable content but don’t have time to write it all?

Maybe you’re like me and spend a huge portion of your time creating for your clients instead of yourself.

I recently finished the Inbound Certification at HubSpot. It’s a fantastic course showing how to use content as a foundation for marketing that serves others.

(If you haven’t yet taken the course, you should check it out – they cover strategies, tips, and advice for websites and blogs. And it’s totally FREE. If you sell online and haven’t done this, I highly recommend it – even if it’s just to make sure you’ve covered all the bases.)

The right content attracts your best prospects and leads them along every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Content is what you give in exchange for that valuable email address – the permission to start a conversation and a relationship with your prospects.

Content keeps them on your email list. If it fails to be relevant or helpful, your readers will either drop out or become inactive.

Fresh and timely content in your emails, posts, and blogs established trust, relevance, and authority.

But what if you’re running your biz on a small budget, can’t find a writer, or lack the time to create the content yourself? Content curation may be the answer you’re looking for.

Disclosure: Some products and links to products on this site are affiliate links. I will earn a commission for any purchases you make. This will not cost you anything. My goal with this site is to help educate and inspire you, and any profits made will enable me to continue to help others.

Why curate content?

1 – It allows you to share relevant tools and information with your network

2 – It associates your name and business with the quality of the content you share

Link to excellent sources and uphold an excellent reputation.

3 – It can lead to new relationships with the creators of posts you share

One word here: Twitter. Look me up on Twitter @JudyOlbrych. And if you want to know how to create quality connections on social media, read anything by Phil Gerbyshak. He has mastered the art of being a friend on Social. He’s also one of the founders at Vengreso, where you’ll find an impressive collection of the most up-to-date tips and training for social media networking.

I’ve tried several services for gathering and posting content and thought I’d include a quick guide to top five I use – there are MANY more!

1 – Feedly

Feedly is a curation platform that lets you access a rolling news feed from your favorite online publications. It displays the most up-to-date articles for each with numbers to indicate how popular each story is.

With the free extension, you can …

Choose specific publications – up to 100 feeds for free

Bookmark articles to save for later

share content with convenient buttons or enter it manually into your scheduling service

bookmark your story to read later

Clip to Evernote

Star to save content to a board – where you can group articles by topic or project

You can share by email or via Buffer or Hootsuite

You can share directly to Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook

You can also stick articles in Pocket or OneNote notebooks

With the paid version ($5.41/month), you can also sort articles by topic, enjoy unlimited feeds, automatically personalize your shares, share directly to additional social media platforms, and more.

One more thing … if you have to create content and you want it to be relevant, you can find out what’s hot on Feedly and use a FREE IFTTT recipe to send it to a Trello board where you gather ideas for new posts. If you’re using free Feedly, you can still create your own Trello card by hand!

2 – Buffer

Buffer allows you to schedule 10 posts across 4 networks for free. It helps you determine the best posting times based on data analysis. Buffer also gives feedback and stats to show you which posts and tweets are getting seen and attracting the greatest response.

The paid version offers content suggestions and allows you to schedule more posts in advance.

Buffer’s companion website, “Ask Pablo,” provides graphics and quotes you can mix and match for fast social media graphics people love to like and share. The fonts are limited, and the graphics are the ones you see on Pixabay …however, the user interface makes it super easy and my Pablo posts have gotten some of the best responses.

3 – Klout

Klout is a fantastic free resource for finding recent and relevant articles by topic. You can isolate ONE topic, and they’ll give you all the articles on that. PLUS they let you know what’s new and fresh and give you a score to let you know how you’re doing as an influencer.

4 – Drum Up

Enjoy free, intelligent content curation or get the paid version. Drum Up even suggests tags and hashtags for each post. Use the free version and manually type out the suggestions they generate OR pay and add them with one click each. You’ll save hours of time sharing all your posts done on FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you’re like me, you’ll love their intelligent content curation. The suggestions are almost always on point and reading through the daily email list they send is a terrific way to get in touch with what’s happening in your world.

5 – Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows users to type in keywords and receive a customized daily bulletin of articles in their inboxes. These include gems hidden in the depths of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Let’s talk about graphics

Remember how I said my Pablo posts got the best responses? Sometimes that seems kind of sad considering that as a writer I work for hours on many of my posts.

However … people LOVE quotes with eye-catching graphics.

You have a few options here. The fastest by far is Pablo. If you want to design your own the easy way – even if you’re not a designer- I suggest Picmonkey or Canva. Both have pre-sized graphics and free or cheap templates you can use.

I recently set up templates in Picmonkey and have been switching out the elements. You could easily hire a graphic designer to do that.

Hire a designer to create a set of templates for you and make the variations yourself – or outsource the whole thing – it all depends on your entrepreneurial journey.